FIG. 1 generally describes prior art of a real time computing system. A real time computing system controls the execution of application programs and interfaces to the system hardware and utilities. A real time computing system 103 may be hosted on electronic hardware 101 such as a processor, or a digital signal processor. As an example, hardware may be hardware on a mobile phone or hardware on any device having embedded software or firmware. The utilities 105 are commonly programs that assist the computing system in control of input/output devices, and management of files.
In such applications, it is useful knowing the load on real time computing system from one or more individual tasks for system design considerations or as an input parameter to other applications 107 that may utilize the task load information. A prior art approach to determine the loading of a task is to capture the task execution data using a logic analyzer and count the instructions executed on the particular individual task. This approach is not real-time and therefore does not allow the task load to be used as input to another application that may effectively use the information. For example, a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) application may use the real-time task load to determine whether to reduce the MIDI voices processed for a future frame.